Lost in the tunnels without a compass
Trying to make sense of truth in Ottawa
Brendan Christopher Cathcart, Staff
Enthusiastic applause erupted from the crowd of approximately 600 student journalists as NDP leader Jack Layton made a confident, striding exit out of the large conference hall, a smile on his face and a fist raised in the air. “Wow,” I thought, “so that’s a politician.” For most of us gathered at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Ottawa to hear the opening keynote address at the 2007 Canadian University Press Conference, it was likely the first time we’d encountered a live one. I can hardly remember what the man said; his skills as a rhetorician were so slick that the words slid in one ear and out the other without so much as bumping into anything vital.
Since there was nothing else on the agenda for that day, Morgan and I decided to go for a walk to explore the city, the capital of Canada, the place where interest rates, immigration quotas, educational reforms, and criminal codes are bound into brick-heavy tomes that can simultaneously support the foundations of entire cities and crush human beings beneath their weight.
Outside, the temperature had begun to drop as evening set in. It had started to snow and the light wind blew wet particles into our faces as we walked in the direction of Parliament. Taking a break from our cold ears for a minute, we ducked into a brightly lit indoor stairway for respite. Growing up boys, the first thing we did was to find out that this particular stairway lead down two flights into a darkened underground mall. No people, no possibility of commerce, it was as serene and unsettling as it is to walk along the yellow strip in the middle of Main Street at 3 a.m. The pillars supporting the floor above were wrapped in mirrors and seemed to expand the space to dimensions that our eyes couldn’t quite make sense of.
When to the left of the food court an open door flashed its seductive possibilities at us, blood rushed into certain unnamable parts, determining our course instinctively. The side of the door hidden against the wall without doubt read “STAFF ONLY,” but since nobody was in sight we chose willed ignorance and walked through it.
“Let’s get back to the purpose of investigative journalism,” said David McKie, an investigative reporter with the CBC, during the first seminar of the conference on Friday morning, “It’s about telling people things they need to know.” The air in the room seemed palpably to vibrate as the three conjured strongmen of the enlightenment — Truth, Integrity, and Responsibility — stood in the corner flexing their muscles. The idea that these foundation builders were there supporting us was comforting and invigorating.
McKie continued, teaching us that the knowledge we would be passing on wasn’t simply hiding in a dark closet, perfectly composed and complete, just waiting to be found. Our job was to self-generate knowledge, by compiling various sources and constructing a coherent argument from them. “Follow the money,” he said confidentially, slipping the Rosetta stone into our pockets, “and you’ll get as close as you can to the truth.” Although this was likely one of the most accurate statements made at the conference, it also pointed to an ironic paradox: following the money will lead up to the gilded penthouse where truth shares an incestuous bed with falsity. Struck by this strange thought, I glanced over to the corner where the three titans were oiled up, posing heroically, and I noticed that when I tried to look directly at them their outlines started to flicker and become fuzzy.
“Hey, check it out,” Morgan said, his eyebrows pointing to one of the many passageways branching off from the labyrinth of narrow concrete tunnels we’d found ourselves wandering around inside of, “X marks the spot.” We’d been turning down one passageway and then the next, going further away from the mall and deeper into the underlying structure of the building, not knowing what we were looking for but absolutely confident that we’d find something worth finding. As we explored, the word “trespassing” rolled around on my tongue like a sugar cube. And then right there in front of us was quite literally an X, formed from concrete, spanning across one of the arches.
Eager and excited we passed under the X, turned the corner and then we saw it, the big score: 300 boxes of white napkins. Slightly less exciting than finding a missing sock under the bed, we nonetheless brainstormed about what we could do with thousands of blank white squares made from the same material as paper. They could be stitched together to make clothing, used as wallpaper, set on fire for warmth, given to the homeless for bedding, written on and bound into an encyclopedia, or folded an cut up to make a mountain of snowflakes. The possibilities seemed to proliferate endlessly and head in every direction imaginable. We were limited only by our capacity to conceive of directions not found with a standard compass.
The night after Juliet O’Neill spoke about her experience of having her liberties temporarily taken away from her by the RCMP — due to a document she obtained which proved that Maher Arar had in fact been turned over to Syrian authorities and subsequently tortured — I got into a heated argument with a colleague in our hotel room.
“There was no emotion in her voice,” she was saying, referring to O’Neill, “so I just couldn’t believe her.” Of course this person was talking purely aesthetics and delivery, not truth. I argued angrily that the two cannot and should not be separated, but really, who was I kidding? As a writer I regularly perform the clandestine geometry of multiplying aesthetics with small truths to produce other truths that may or may not exist.
“It’s true that writing is a dark art,” said Ken Alexander, editor of the Walrus, to a conference room crammed with aspiring journalists. Between disparaging comments about his own personal life and elucidating the joys of the writing life, Alexander tottered on his inebriated heels, trying to balance the unpolished facts of experience with the ideals of literary meaning. “Writing is as important to mankind as food and shelter — if you believe in culture.”
One delegate at the conference came back from a bar late at night with blood on his knuckles. Two guys he’d never met before attacked him just for the sake of attacking someone, and he simply defended himself. Because I hadn’t been involved, I comfortably said nice things to him about the fundamental principles of tolerance and resolving disputes without fists. He stared hard at me in disbelief and responded: “You know, you have some great ideals, but when a guy gets in your face and he wants to hurt you for no reason, then at that point ‘reason’ won’t stop you from getting your face kicked in.”
Leaving the bounty of napkins behind and continuing along our way, I was starting to feel as helpless as starch that had been pulled in through the roots of a tree and circulated out to the furthest branches. If we didn’t find our way out soon, then our free cellular state was in danger of either getting trapped and broken down or we’d get led back out bound by handcuffs. Two nervous wrong turns later, Morgan and I arrived at a set of sensor-activated doors that we hoped would function either as an exit or as a dead end, a limit to just how deep these tunnels went. But no, sure enough they swung wide open, revealing another room with another door that lead to another tunnel, only this time the tunnel had steps leading down further to another door that opened into a sub-floor beneath the city.
“You should never take someone’s words at face value,” argued one of the delegates. We had gotten into the boggy mire of arguing over the validity of truth claims. “Before accepting anything,” he continued, “you should research it fully for yourself.” On the surface it sounded like the most reasonable assertion, especially in light of what David McKie said about the journalist’s task of self-generating knowledge. Any conclusion presented publicly is a result of carefully chosen premises.
Starting out from the same point, two people could branch off to the left and to the right, each compiling multiple different sources and arriving at different conclusions, even ones that are polar opposites. If the presented conclusions of those two people can’t be accepted without research, then the individual premises supporting the conclusions need to be investigated. Then the next step is to investigate the individual claims that were used as premises to support the opposite conclusions, but the problem is that those individual premises are also generated by people, so they shouldn’t be accepted without research either. At this point I started to wonder which claims, and which facts—all originally generated or recorded by people—could ever be accepted as a basis for truth.
When the sensor-activated doors had swung open, they did so with a mechanical loudness that reverberated back down the tunnels, likely emerging as a barely perceptible click out in the food-court. The idea that a gentle click was the only rescue flare we’d be able to manage from our lost boat beneath the Rideau Canal was disturbing to say the least. I remembered at that moment a scene from Tim Blake Nelson’s film The Grey Zone, about Jews who had been put to work in a death camp to help dispose of their own people.
Deep inside a concrete bunker, in a bare concrete room, a woman is being tortured for information. It’s an impossible space morally, socially, metaphysically, and it has no exit; she’s already dead and knows it. In the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp the longest work term lasted three months max before new workers were shipped in to dispose of the bodies of the last workers, and so on, and so on. Trapped in abject terror and helplessness, her fingernails are pulled out of her bleeding hands as she screams and her mind turns inside out. The camera slowly pulls back out of the room, backs slowly down the hallway, until eventually her screaming is about as quiet and uninterpretable as the click in the food court.
It was time to retrace our footsteps and head back to where we started out.
During his keynote address, Andrew Coyne, national editor of Maclean’s magazine, said that the ideological middle ground doesn’t really exist and that politicians know this and do their best to pull the public’s perception of the middle over to their side. “There are not only two sides to every issue,” he said, “there might be 90.” Truth, at least in the Canadian political context, is an ephemeral idea constantly subject to change. Somewhat miraculously, truth gets determined and stays afloat somewhere in the sea of competing ideas.
Coyne’s remarks helped make sense of something that seemed at first to be very strange. During the conference, Ian Capstick, press secretary for the NDP, lead a seminar on effective scrumming techniques for reporters, which seemed counter-intuitive, since his career consists in teaching and assisting politicians to dodge around the attempts of reporters to get at the truth. I closed my eyes and saw a snake teaching a group of mongooses how to battle snakes more effectively. Despite the strangeness of the situation, Capstick’s confidence was off the charts. That’s when I realized what was happening; he was helping to train the next line of players in a game that is absolutely necessary and vital to Canada’s survival as a functioning democracy.
To our great relief, Morgan and I successfully retraced our steps and found our way out of the tunnel system. We headed back to the hotel, met up with our co-workers, had a few drinks, and told them all about getting lost somewhere underground. The next day, I went to the Ottawa Public Library, situated downtown, and sat up in a reading wing between the first and second floors with about 20 other people. Looking around, I noticed that we were mostly different ages, races, and clearly had different economic and educative realities. Whether reading or sleeping, we all sat beneath the same swirling, interlaced glass vortex of a sculpture that hung from the ceiling, in a building designed to peacefully house competing ideas of the world.
